The problem with eliminating the minimum wage is the assumption that
wages are a simple supply and demand curve. In reality, parts of the
employee supply is rather inelastic.
In non-economic speak:
People have short term and long term expenses. Short term expenses are
things like food, clothing, housing, etc. Long term expenses are things
like health care, retirement, education, etc. For immediate survival,
people only need to meet the short term expenses. Without a minimum wage,
when there is a surplus of workers, wages are pushed down to the bare
minimum of short term expenses, and below. People end up living in
sub-par conditions, borrowing for unexpected expenses, and have nothing for
health care, retirement, etc.
An example:
Bob needs $1500 for housing, food, clothing, a decent vehicle, health
care, retirement, and a rainy day fund. However, Bob only needs $500
for food, clothing, and a rat infested apartment split between 2 other
roommates. Now assume that there are a surplus of workers out there
just like Bob - are wages going to stabilize at $1500 or $500?
A CD is a collection of pits, and the reflective quality of each pit is
in a different range depending on if the bit is a 0 or a 1. A CD burner
uses a dye in each pit, and the stronger laser in a burner chemically
changes the reflectivity of the dye. At higher speed, less time is
spent on each pit, which allows less energy for the chemical change.
At lower speeds, more time is spent on each pit, which allows more
energy for the chemical change. (At least for CD-Rs, CD-RWs don't
use dyes at all, but instead uses a shift in chemical structure to
change the reflectivity - but the principle is still the same).
I'm far from being an expert, and there is a lot of misinformation
floating around out there, so if you are curious, I highly suggest that
you do your own research. The above explanation was the way that
burners were explained to me, and it makes sense.
Incidentally, even with `burn-proof' technology in newer CD drives,
a CD that has experienced a buffer underrun will have a short gap
between when the laser was turned off and when the laser was turned
back on. CD drives should have correction technology that transparently
hides these flaws, but some CD readers do have problems with them.
The problem with CD's is that they are not digital. The amount of light
reflected from each part of the drive do not end up being either X amount
or Y amount. Instead, there is a range, and if the amount of light returned
falls into one range, then its considered a pit, and if the amount of light
returned falls into another range, its considered a non-pit. For audio
CDs, it doesn't matter, a flipped bit is probably not detectable by the human
ear. If you want to experiment, try scratching up a audio CD and a data CD -
its amazing how badly damaged an audio CD can be without any noticeable sound
difference. Data CDs try to get around a small amount of errors by including
additional information to help correct any small read errors - which is why
the capacity for a data CD is smaller then the capacity for an audio CD.
Amazingly, most of the time, the analog->digital conversion works without a
problem, and computers receive the five billion bits without any show-stopping
errors.
Make sure you have a decent CD drive. If you have a first-generation
CD-R drive, replace it. Lite-on is cheap, but seems to do well in reviews.
Burn at the lowest possible speed for a better burn.
Verify DMA settings for each device.
For an IDE burner and an IDE hard drive, keep the hard drive on a
separate channel from the burner. For example, set up the hard drive as
primary master, and the CD drive as secondary master.
Keep the burned CDs in a cool, dark place. Use a jeweled case for each
to prevent scratches.
I don't see any reason why USB flash media wouldn't work for backups if the
OS supports it. The only problem is that USB flash media is more expensive
then CD-Rs. $20 will buy you enough CD's for a monthly 'archive' (12 CDs/1
per month), plus a weekly backup/incremental daily backup (4 per month),
even if you don't reuse the weekly backup media (personally, with the
cost per CD, I wouldn't). However, to implement such a system with USB
flash drives (assuming $20/drive), would cost $320 dollars.
I love my USB flash drive, but its not cost effective for backups.
Sorry for the OT post, but I wish to `correct' the previous poster's
comment:
From US history, it seems that the campaign against marijuana was not
due to economic reasons (nobody important was making or losing large
amount of money with it) but due to the perception that marijuana was
associated with a specific racial group (African Americans) and that
it had a tendency to drive people to commit violent crimes.
So, blame lack of knowledge and racism for the ban against marijuana,
not dark economic conspiracies.
( Incidentally, I believe I remember reading about how marijuana was
legal during prohibition, oddly enough. )
People aren't that obsessed about regular movies...
Just imagine, seeing a character living in New York hop on a bike (sound
effect of jet engine) ride 3 blocks, be in Tokyo, eat some rice (crunchy
sounds), then ride back (sound effect of jet engine again), stopping for
a chunk of orange ice called `coffee' before heading home, which, of course,
is a castle built in the middle of an 8 lane interstate, which the cars
bounce over.
Nobody would complain, because its a WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF!
I am a strong believer in 'innocent until proven guilty', but I also see the
humor in the irony of the RIAA winning.
Just imagine that it was impossible to find any music by any RIAA members
online. People would go to the p2p networks, and only find music of artists
that encouraged their files to be traded. Some of them wouldn't have
the polish of commercial artists, but there would be enough "good" music for
people to be happy. The end result would be diminishing interest in the
RIAA bands.
Be careful what you wish for...
( As a footnote, if you do want to share music online, check out the bands
and artists that allow their work to be redistributed freely. Listen to
their music, and, if you like them, put them into your 'share' folder of
your p2p app, with the information in the id3 tags [or whatever ogg uses],
and a text file in the same folder explaining the copywrite information
and links to the band's website. Of course, once you end up sharing
enough megs of files this way, you'll probably get sued by the RIAA, so
make sure you have a good lawyer and can countersue for costs. )
I can't speak for other laptop users, but the reason I like
PCMCIA cards is that they provide an easy way to swap in and out components,
fairly standard (way easier to find a PCMCIA modem then a firewire modem),
and the integrated card is harder to break then a dongle, thus leading to
the 'bulge' that you speak of for firewire, network, etc cards.
It would be nice (but I'm not expecting) for the new standard to give the
PC Card Redux enough room where it can fit, say, an RJ-45 or two squeezed
together USB or firewire ports without a dongle. Instead of a flat card
like we have in PCMCIA or PC Card, it would be more of a square peggish
looking card. OTOH, the flatter cardbus cards we have today are perfect
for miniature hard drives, and memory sticks still aren't made in the largest
size as the miniature hard drives.
As for myself with my old laptop, I'm going to check out the Xircom realport
cards.:)
Sure, you can spend either $350k on employees to work your system or
tech support.
$350k doesn't buy a lot of employees[1], but then again, do you think that
Redhat loses money on its tech support? Somewhere, someone is getting paid
to answer your questions.
~ Dasunt
[1] Unless you are in the Fargo area. In that case, I'll work for cheap.:)
Penguin's namesake was originally a large, flightless auk of the northern
hemisphere. When explorers saw a southern flightless bird of the polar region, they named them after the northern bird they were familiar with.
Unfortunately, the flightless auks went extinct due to human beings, leaving
only one type of bird with the name `penguin'.
AFAIK, both stable and unstable get rather quick security updates. Testing
has a delay for security updates from unstable, thus, if you run testing,
subscribe to the debian-security mailing list.
If you do want the latest and greatest though, try Mandrake, they seem to
have a nice distribution, especially for the desktop.
The reason why I stick with debian (debian stable on both of my machines,
currently) is that its easy to update, easy to upgrade, and has a wide
selection of packages, often with several subpackages compiled for different
features. When I use Redhat machines, I end up wanting package XYZ, which,
in their infinite wisdom, Redhat doesn't supply.
If you want Windows, use Windows. If you want MacOS, use Apple. If you
want a free Unix-like OS, use Linux.
Perhaps you want an OS where software and hardware installation is run
seemlessly (probably should have the default running as root then). Perhaps
you want an OS where software vendors tend to give closed sourced drivers
of varying reliability (would probably impact stability though). Perhaps you
want an OS that decides to be friendly by hiding information (debugging and
problem solver will be harder). Guess what, that OS exists, and it is not
Linux!
Unix has a steep learning curve. However, once you are past it, many things
become possible. Windows does not have that versitility.
If you want an easy-to-use OS, you can break off of a distro and
start to code it yourself. I won't stop you. But don't ask me to code it,
and don't expect me to want to use it.
Just my $.02
Speaking of the printer example, why not purchase a decent CUPS-compatible
printer in the first place? Worked for me.
This post may seem very hateful to people who don't browse usenet.
However, Outlook/Outlook Express has the horrible, horrible tendency to
mangle posts.
> Outlook tends to have break long lines while quoting at the most
annoying spots.
> Which leads to a mess similiar to what's in this post: an ugly,
horribly formatted
>quote. Of course, Outlook ends up formatting this broken quote
style correctly,
> which always makes a fun discussion for why the problem
is with Outlook
> instead of with every other news client out there. *sigh*
Which makes Outlook a poor, poor choice for usenet.
> And it doesn't seem to encourage snipping the original quote.
> > However, it makes the conversation hard to follow.
> > > At first glance, it doesn't seem to be a problem.
> > > > Never mind Outlook sets up the cursor to top
> > > > post by default.
There also seems to be frequent problems with the line lengths of Outlook
users' posts.
Do yourself a favor - if you want to post to usenet under windows,
download a decent usenet client (Forte Free Agent seems to be preferred by
many, although I haven't used it). Learn how to properly quote, and set
your line lengths to a sane number.
This might be overkill for the average hobbiest repair kit, but
I find that it works well.
First, a binder of software:
Knoppix - Operating system in a bottle with the tools you'll
use.
Partition Magic - Being able to shrink a partition just to
be able to make another partition and do a clean OS install
is invaluable.
Norton Ghost - The best in drive imaging.
CD with DOS boot floppy images (and some spare floppy disks
stuck in the back) - You will need dos floppies to flash
most bioses.
AV software - There are free AV scanners out there.
AntiSpyware software - Make machines run cleaner/faster.
filemon, regmon, etc - Small apps to figure out what applications
are doing what to the system.
memtest86, burncpu - memory tester and cpu heat tester - keep
images on a CD and spare floppies to dd them to.
GNU software disk - Latest stable releases of OpenOffice,
Mozilla, CDex, etc for obvious reasons (e.g. "What can I do
to stop pop ups while browsing? How can I write papers?
How do I make mp3s?")
Free proprietary software people would be interested in -
For example, Trillian.
CD copies of any legitimate OS CDs or utility CDs you
own - Never, ever take the actual CD with you, it will
be destroyed sooner or later. Make copies.
CD of windows updates and patches - Many people have 56k
connections - you don't want to wait for the downloads.
CD of virus definition updates for common AV software - Again,
you don't want to wait for software to update over 56k
connections.
CD or reference materials - I find that a good set of hardware
documentation works wonders. Of course, you can always use
dead-tree format, but a CD is a lot more compact.
Now, the tools:
A phillips screwdriver.
A flat head screwdriver.
A collection of nut drivers, good for badly stripped screws.
A collect of torx head screwdrivers for those damn
Compaqs!
A collection of small phillips and flat head screwdrivers -
useful for laptops and the occasional rewiring of
LED and USB connectors (use the smallest flathead screwdriver
to pry up the tab, slide the metal wire out of the connector,
then push the wire into another connector.
Needle nose pliers.
Tweezers.
Bright flashlight.
Small container of common computer screws.
Container of compressed air.
Bandaids (some [usually cheap] computer cases have sharp
edges).
Cable ties.
Some people suggest a small dental mirror as well, and a
screw retriever - I've never found either to be that
useful though.:)
Digital multimeter.
Outlet polarity and ground tester.
Small tablet and pen for notes.
Now, replacement parts to be able to swap in and out:
A run of a mill ethernet card (ne2000 compatible or
common 3com card seems to work best - try to get
one that is DOS, Novell, Windows and Linux compatible)
A boring soundblaster sound card (cheap soundblasters are
far from being the best cards out there, but they tend
to be well supported by OSes)
33.6 or 56k hardware modem - you can find the 33.6k
modems dirt cheap used, but the 56k hardware modems will
run you $50 or so new - either works well for testing
out bad internet connections.
Known good PCI video adapter.
Working floppy, and 80-Wire IDE cable.
Known good older HDD (2 GB should work for testing)
Printer and serial cable.
100mbit network cable.
Quality USB 2.0 cable.
8' AC power cable.
Y power adapter and molex-to-floppy power adapter.
I'm sure there are going to be plenty of linux, SCO, GPL, and other
excellent questions posted, but I prefer the more interesting, lets
not preach to the choir here (heck, I can guess Peren's opinion on
the SCO vs. World case, on IP, on the Linux desktop, etc).
Here's my question (actually 2 questions, cleverly disguised as one):
What are the five best technological features of Windows (2k, XP, etc)
that the OS movement (GNU/Linux, and xBSD) is missing? From a technological
perspective, where has the OS movement failed, and proprietary software
succeeded?
A long, long time ago, one DOS-based WP program sued another, since the
menu elements were the same. The case came to court, where it was ruled
that copying the same interface that users expected was legal (an analogy
would be that the pedal and steering wheel layout in cars tend to be the
same, and even the dash board in a lot of models are very, very similiar).
Even with the DMCA, it is still legal to reverse engineer a product for
interoperability. In the days of the old console games, it was ruled legal
that the new product could fake authorization to work with the old product
if that was the only way of getting it to work. (The case involved a
company who reverse-engineered a gaming console to get their games to work,
without paying a manufacturer a license. But, anytime a game was loaded into
the system, it would start up with a message that the game was legally
licensed.)
I have no doubt that Microsoft has patents covering the look and feel and
the operation of their OS. Doesn't make it legal.
They are called muds - go to www.mudconnect.com and search through the
listings, make sure you check the role-play box.
Oh, wait, you want pretty graphical pictures? Argh!!!! Wait a second,
I have an 'Ask Slashdot' question to submit: 'Why Do the Self Described
"Role Players" want pretty useless pictures and a graphical world that
basically limits what the player can do?'
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with eliminating the minimum wage is the assumption that wages are a simple supply and demand curve. In reality, parts of the employee supply is rather inelastic.
In non-economic speak:
People have short term and long term expenses. Short term expenses are things like food, clothing, housing, etc. Long term expenses are things like health care, retirement, education, etc. For immediate survival, people only need to meet the short term expenses. Without a minimum wage, when there is a surplus of workers, wages are pushed down to the bare minimum of short term expenses, and below. People end up living in sub-par conditions, borrowing for unexpected expenses, and have nothing for health care, retirement, etc.
An example:
Bob needs $1500 for housing, food, clothing, a decent vehicle, health care, retirement, and a rainy day fund. However, Bob only needs $500 for food, clothing, and a rat infested apartment split between 2 other roommates. Now assume that there are a surplus of workers out there just like Bob - are wages going to stabilize at $1500 or $500?I didn't get the memo that linux's goal was to take over the world and crush Microsoft Windows.
I've been laboring under the impression that linux's goal was to make a nice operating system for technically minded people to use and play with.
* sigh *
Explanation:
A CD is a collection of pits, and the reflective quality of each pit is in a different range depending on if the bit is a 0 or a 1. A CD burner uses a dye in each pit, and the stronger laser in a burner chemically changes the reflectivity of the dye. At higher speed, less time is spent on each pit, which allows less energy for the chemical change. At lower speeds, more time is spent on each pit, which allows more energy for the chemical change. (At least for CD-Rs, CD-RWs don't use dyes at all, but instead uses a shift in chemical structure to change the reflectivity - but the principle is still the same).
I'm far from being an expert, and there is a lot of misinformation floating around out there, so if you are curious, I highly suggest that you do your own research. The above explanation was the way that burners were explained to me, and it makes sense.
Incidentally, even with `burn-proof' technology in newer CD drives, a CD that has experienced a buffer underrun will have a short gap between when the laser was turned off and when the laser was turned back on. CD drives should have correction technology that transparently hides these flaws, but some CD readers do have problems with them.
The problem with CD's is that they are not digital. The amount of light reflected from each part of the drive do not end up being either X amount or Y amount. Instead, there is a range, and if the amount of light returned falls into one range, then its considered a pit, and if the amount of light returned falls into another range, its considered a non-pit. For audio CDs, it doesn't matter, a flipped bit is probably not detectable by the human ear. If you want to experiment, try scratching up a audio CD and a data CD - its amazing how badly damaged an audio CD can be without any noticeable sound difference. Data CDs try to get around a small amount of errors by including additional information to help correct any small read errors - which is why the capacity for a data CD is smaller then the capacity for an audio CD. Amazingly, most of the time, the analog->digital conversion works without a problem, and computers receive the five billion bits without any show-stopping errors.
Yet another one of life's lessons that can be learned from nethack.
If the poison does not kill you, it will probably drop your strength, thus making you weaker.
Before you give up on CD-R/CD-RWs, try this:
I don't see any reason why USB flash media wouldn't work for backups if the OS supports it. The only problem is that USB flash media is more expensive then CD-Rs. $20 will buy you enough CD's for a monthly 'archive' (12 CDs/1 per month), plus a weekly backup/incremental daily backup (4 per month), even if you don't reuse the weekly backup media (personally, with the cost per CD, I wouldn't). However, to implement such a system with USB flash drives (assuming $20/drive), would cost $320 dollars.
I love my USB flash drive, but its not cost effective for backups.
Sorry for the OT post, but I wish to `correct' the previous poster's comment:
From US history, it seems that the campaign against marijuana was not due to economic reasons (nobody important was making or losing large amount of money with it) but due to the perception that marijuana was associated with a specific racial group (African Americans) and that it had a tendency to drive people to commit violent crimes.
So, blame lack of knowledge and racism for the ban against marijuana, not dark economic conspiracies.
( Incidentally, I believe I remember reading about how marijuana was legal during prohibition, oddly enough. )
People aren't that obsessed about regular movies...
Just imagine, seeing a character living in New York hop on a bike (sound effect of jet engine) ride 3 blocks, be in Tokyo, eat some rice (crunchy sounds), then ride back (sound effect of jet engine again), stopping for a chunk of orange ice called `coffee' before heading home, which, of course, is a castle built in the middle of an 8 lane interstate, which the cars bounce over.
Nobody would complain, because its a WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF!
Damn Anal Nerds...
I am a strong believer in 'innocent until proven guilty', but I also see the humor in the irony of the RIAA winning.
Just imagine that it was impossible to find any music by any RIAA members online. People would go to the p2p networks, and only find music of artists that encouraged their files to be traded. Some of them wouldn't have the polish of commercial artists, but there would be enough "good" music for people to be happy. The end result would be diminishing interest in the RIAA bands.
Be careful what you wish for...
( As a footnote, if you do want to share music online, check out the bands and artists that allow their work to be redistributed freely. Listen to their music, and, if you like them, put them into your 'share' folder of your p2p app, with the information in the id3 tags [or whatever ogg uses], and a text file in the same folder explaining the copywrite information and links to the band's website. Of course, once you end up sharing enough megs of files this way, you'll probably get sued by the RIAA, so make sure you have a good lawyer and can countersue for costs. )
I can't speak for other laptop users, but the reason I like PCMCIA cards is that they provide an easy way to swap in and out components, fairly standard (way easier to find a PCMCIA modem then a firewire modem), and the integrated card is harder to break then a dongle, thus leading to the 'bulge' that you speak of for firewire, network, etc cards.
It would be nice (but I'm not expecting) for the new standard to give the PC Card Redux enough room where it can fit, say, an RJ-45 or two squeezed together USB or firewire ports without a dongle. Instead of a flat card like we have in PCMCIA or PC Card, it would be more of a square peggish looking card. OTOH, the flatter cardbus cards we have today are perfect for miniature hard drives, and memory sticks still aren't made in the largest size as the miniature hard drives.
As for myself with my old laptop, I'm going to check out the Xircom realport cards. :)
I'm not sure about your area, but where I'm from (north central US), a lot of businesses still use DOS apps daily or weekly for tasks.
Sure, you can spend either $350k on employees to work your system or tech support.
$350k doesn't buy a lot of employees[1], but then again, do you think that Redhat loses money on its tech support? Somewhere, someone is getting paid to answer your questions.
~ Dasunt
[1] Unless you are in the Fargo area. In that case, I'll work for cheap. :)
More trivia:
Penguin's namesake was originally a large, flightless auk of the northern hemisphere. When explorers saw a southern flightless bird of the polar region, they named them after the northern bird they were familiar with.
Unfortunately, the flightless auks went extinct due to human beings, leaving only one type of bird with the name `penguin'.
AFAIK, both stable and unstable get rather quick security updates. Testing has a delay for security updates from unstable, thus, if you run testing, subscribe to the debian-security mailing list.
If you do want the latest and greatest though, try Mandrake, they seem to have a nice distribution, especially for the desktop.
The reason why I stick with debian (debian stable on both of my machines, currently) is that its easy to update, easy to upgrade, and has a wide selection of packages, often with several subpackages compiled for different features. When I use Redhat machines, I end up wanting package XYZ, which, in their infinite wisdom, Redhat doesn't supply.
My biggest problem with linux is other people.
If you want Windows, use Windows. If you want MacOS, use Apple. If you want a free Unix-like OS, use Linux.
Perhaps you want an OS where software and hardware installation is run seemlessly (probably should have the default running as root then). Perhaps you want an OS where software vendors tend to give closed sourced drivers of varying reliability (would probably impact stability though). Perhaps you want an OS that decides to be friendly by hiding information (debugging and problem solver will be harder). Guess what, that OS exists, and it is not Linux!
Unix has a steep learning curve. However, once you are past it, many things become possible. Windows does not have that versitility.
If you want an easy-to-use OS, you can break off of a distro and start to code it yourself. I won't stop you. But don't ask me to code it, and don't expect me to want to use it.
Just my $.02
Speaking of the printer example, why not purchase a decent CUPS-compatible printer in the first place? Worked for me.
Minorities? Hell, as far as I can tell, if the media is against you, and you don't have the money for a good lawyer, you are screwed, white or black.
Case in Point
This post may seem very hateful to people who don't browse usenet.
However, Outlook/Outlook Express has the horrible, horrible tendency to mangle posts.
> Outlook tends to have break long lines while quoting at the most
annoying spots.
> Which leads to a mess similiar to what's in this post: an ugly,
horribly formatted
>quote. Of course, Outlook ends up formatting this broken quote
style correctly,
> which always makes a fun discussion for why the problem
is with Outlook
> instead of with every other news client out there. *sigh*
Which makes Outlook a poor, poor choice for usenet.
> And it doesn't seem to encourage snipping the original quote.
> > However, it makes the conversation hard to follow.
> > > At first glance, it doesn't seem to be a problem.
> > > > Never mind Outlook sets up the cursor to top
> > > > post by default.
There also seems to be frequent problems with the line lengths of Outlook users' posts.
Do yourself a favor - if you want to post to usenet under windows, download a decent usenet client (Forte Free Agent seems to be preferred by many, although I haven't used it). Learn how to properly quote, and set your line lengths to a sane number.
This might be overkill for the average hobbiest repair kit, but I find that it works well.
First, a binder of software:
Now, the tools:
Now, replacement parts to be able to swap in and out:
If Xforms allows the browser to verify fields, doesn't that mean we base our security on trusting the client?
The parent poster writes:
and id be greatfull that no unwitting user *accidently* installs another DHCP
I believe that, with a standard Windows OS (98, ME, 2k, XP), its rather trivial to start a DHCP server with the supplied Windows OS.
I've never found it to be a problem though. Windows users are more likely to install/be tricked into installing every inane app out there.
I'm sure there are going to be plenty of linux, SCO, GPL, and other excellent questions posted, but I prefer the more interesting, lets not preach to the choir here (heck, I can guess Peren's opinion on the SCO vs. World case, on IP, on the Linux desktop, etc).
Here's my question (actually 2 questions, cleverly disguised as one):
What are the five best technological features of Windows (2k, XP, etc) that the OS movement (GNU/Linux, and xBSD) is missing? From a technological perspective, where has the OS movement failed, and proprietary software succeeded?
[ BSDhead #1 ]: Did you hear? FreeBSD has 9000 ports now!
[ BSDhead #2 ]: Crap! It is too popular! It has hit the mainstream!
[ BSDhead #1 ]: That's what I was thinking - lets switch to OpenBSD
A long, long time ago, one DOS-based WP program sued another, since the menu elements were the same. The case came to court, where it was ruled that copying the same interface that users expected was legal (an analogy would be that the pedal and steering wheel layout in cars tend to be the same, and even the dash board in a lot of models are very, very similiar).
Even with the DMCA, it is still legal to reverse engineer a product for interoperability. In the days of the old console games, it was ruled legal that the new product could fake authorization to work with the old product if that was the only way of getting it to work. (The case involved a company who reverse-engineered a gaming console to get their games to work, without paying a manufacturer a license. But, anytime a game was loaded into the system, it would start up with a message that the game was legally licensed.)
I have no doubt that Microsoft has patents covering the look and feel and the operation of their OS. Doesn't make it legal.
There is also sugarfree instant ice tea mix that you can find in the states. A little sweeter for those of us who enjoy that. :)
Downside is that the artificial sweetner causes cancer in lab rats. :(
Probably still worth it from a risk/benefit ratio.
They are called muds - go to www.mudconnect.com and search through the listings, make sure you check the role-play box.
Oh, wait, you want pretty graphical pictures? Argh!!!! Wait a second, I have an 'Ask Slashdot' question to submit: 'Why Do the Self Described "Role Players" want pretty useless pictures and a graphical world that basically limits what the player can do?'
Tragic.
I remember when they first had automobiles, and I heard them say that one day, everyone would be able to wide and far, and make local trips quickly.
Unfortunately, since most people cannot build their own cars, nor the roads to drive the cars on, the dream of affordable transportation died.
Back to walking.
[/Old man voice]